iLike

So it's finally been unveiled. The new iPhone, and having had a look at it, I think I'd quite like one. You see, I don't have my iPod yet, although I'm planning on buying it this month, and I'm planning on going for a Nano, because it's all nice and small.

The thing is that the iPhone comes in an 8GB version, for $599, reckon on £400 in the UK, and that's only £250 more than the Nano I was going to buy. OK, it's more than double, but the iPhone is only a little bigger than my current RAZR, (which I bought for it's compact size) and the software and build quality on the RAZR is not good. I'd expect the iPhone to be built well.

Of course, it's going to come down to networks and usability. You see I love the idea of wifi on my widescreen phone, and of all the other toys that it seems to be able to do, but what I really want from the web on my phone is low cost high speed web surfing.

Looking great and being very easy to use is all very well, but i-mode has always been quick and easy to use, and best of all, low cost. In Japan, it's packet data, so you pay for the packet downloaded (eg per page, not per minute you're barely connected downloading a page, or even viewing a page. Best of all the cost is often as low as 0.3Y per page. (There is usually a subscription fee for the content provider, eg Tangotown(one of my old favourites) or whoever, and this comes off the bill, with the provider getting 90% and Docomo getting 10%.

The beauty is the simplicity for the phone user.

Mari Matsunaga had i-mode right, it's all about content, which is why i-mode took off in Japan (on the second attempt). She didn't invent it, but she knew what would make the technology appeal to people. If I can access the entire web on a nice big pocket-sized screen, that's fine, but I want to know that I can do it without worrying how much I'm paying for it.

The iPhone has huge potential, if it's provided properly, and the thing I like most about the iPhone, is the ideas it gives me. And the ideas I already had that it can make workable.

Also today there was a brief mention of the appleTV, and it looks nifty enough. Just as I expected - download movies, iTunes and similar, via my iBook, to my TV (widescreen, it suggests, but I don't have that yet either). But the thing that stood out for me was that it 'only' has an 80GB memory. Which is not nearly as much as I might have expected. Try 200GB

Now I appreciate that 200GB might seem like a lot, excessive even, especially considering that at the last minute I plumped for a tiny 20GB on my iBook, reckoning that I wouldn't need the 30GB or 40GB also available at the time. In fact, I only use just over half of the gigs I have, but, for downloading TV, I think I'd like a chunky hard drive. You always want more than you think.

It's funny to talk about these sizes of memories, really. Remember Johnny Five? Well, when he returned for the sequel, he had an increased memory of 512MB, (although we don't know if this was RAM or hard drive). Gotta love the Eighties!